an engineer who loves polish, cats, typography, robots, and many, many other things

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PWI twofer: Sinful Colors Unicorn

My delightfully analytical sister asked me yesterday if formulas were consistent across brands – for example, is OPI strictly better than Sinful Colors. In my experience, mostly no? Most of my SC colors, and most everything else from a major brand, have reasonable formulas (although OPI is the queen of formulation). What IS consistent is formulas across colors. Yellows are notoriously streaky, as are pastels. Neons tend to be translucent, requiring white undies, and almost invariably dry matte or semi-matte; teals are stainers. And so on.

So I’m not completely stunned that the pastel yellow Sinful Colors Unicorn…

Five coats. Five. And it’s still a streaky mess. (Click for the full size if you don’t believe me.) I have better things to do with my time. Hobbies are, generally speaking, fun! This is not fun.

…is a total loss.

So, okay, first of all, “five coats and not there yet” is unacceptable. Among other things, the more coats I do, the more nail polish is going to end up on my cuticles. (And hands. And desk. And, in one memorable incident, cat.) I don’t do the traditional cleanup with acetone and a brush, because, 1, it’s smelly and a hassle, and, 2, errors are basically invisible when you’re not looking at macro shots. So I can’t be arsed, I guess. Second, I look weird and terrible in yellow; I have yet to find an exception to this.

Since this was already horrible, I decided to try something new-to-me. A “jelly sandwich” is a thing where you alternate layers of a translucent polish and glitter, so that the glitter shows to varying degrees. When done correctly, they can actually be really visually interesting. So I poked around and decided on a yet-to-be-reviewed polish.*

It looks worse in real life, strangely enough. I *cough* wonder if a nicer camera might fix that. Which doesn’t matter because I am not getting one.

Not an improvement. Unicorn is murky, not a true “jelly” (transparent, colored polish), so the glitters don’t glitter. You can see on my middle finger (touching my thumb) where I tried to do multiple layers. It just looks like polka dots, basically.

Unicorn, hall of shame! Hall of shame, unicorn. Have fun!

* Wet’n’Wild Caught on Sapphire, if you care. I didn’t really process how dumb that name is until I typed it out.